Study: Blood on Shroud of Turin suggests victim was tortured

'Nanoparticles' found on relic consistent with someone who suffered 'forceful trauma'

Joe Wilson is an intern with WND. He hails from Sunman, Indiana, and is finishing his bachelor's degree in History and Classical Language at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is a devout Catholic and a baseball enthusiast, as well as an amateur filmmaker.

A new study conducted on the Shroud of Turin, believed by many Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, suggests the person whose image it bears went through intense physical suffering, literally torture, before death.

The London Daily Mail reports that two Italian academics, Elvio Carlino of the Institute of Crystallography in Bari and Guido Fanti of the University of Padua, recently published a study that shows the linen cloth bearing the image of a man believed to be Jesus Christ contains “nanoparticles” consistent with the blood of a torture victim.

“These findings could only be revealed by the methods recently developed in the field of electron microscopy,” Elvio told the publication.

The researchers specifically addressed claims that a face was painted on the cloth.

They said particles of this kind would be impossible to forge unless using cutting-edge modern technology, so the allegations it was painted in the 13th or 14th century to inspire devotion cannot be substantiated.

The Daily Mail reports “the blood contained high levels of substances called creatinine and ferritin, found in patients who suffer forceful traumas like torture.”

A healthy man’s blood would not contain such high levels of these chemicals, the report said.

“Hence, the presence of these biological nanoparticles found during our experiments point to a violent death for the man wrapped in the Turin Shroud,” Fanti told the Daily Mail.

The Shroud is a cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered the Roman torture-execution of crucifixion. It’s approximately three feet by nine feet and has been in the custody of the Catholic Church for generations. It has been documented to have been kept in various Middle East locations over the centuries.

The newest findings were reported in PlosOne, a scientific journal, and addressed the ancient relic .

Virtually all of the testing done on the Shroud, on display at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, has corroborated the tradition that it is from the the first century and the location where Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected.

Furthermore, National Review reported the blood type of the man buried in the Shroud of Turin and the one who used the Sudarium venerated in Oviedo, Spain — believed to have covered Christ’s head immediately after the crucifixion — are both male AB and could have belonged to the same man.

Many popes, including St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, have prayed near the relic of the Shroud, but the Catholic Church, with characteristic caution when it comes to miracles and apparitions, has yet to officially declare its authenticity.

Previously, Bruno Barberis, director of the International Center of Sindonology in Turin, Italy, told WND why the Shroud is thought to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus.

He noted that the injuries seen on the body of the crucified man in the Shroud bear an exact relationship to the wounds Christ suffered in his passion and death, as described by the four gospels of the New Testament.

“The crown of thorns and the wound in the side we see in the man of the Shroud were not normal characteristics to the countless thousands of people the ancient Romans crucified,” he explained at the time. “The probability that the man of the Shroud and Jesus of Nazareth are the same person is very high.”

He discounted the reliability of the carbon-14 dating tests conducted on the Shroud in 1988. He said the area of the Shroud where the sample for the carbon-14 tests had been taken was contaminated by medieval reweaving with cotton.

WND previously reported the conclusion of a scientific paper published in 2005 by the late Ray Rogers, a chemist with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and a member of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project. Rogers said that after a fire in 1532 nearly destroyed the Shroud, French Poor Clare nuns repaired it by adding 16 burn patches and expertly reweaving the edges of the Shroud with cotton dyed to resemble the original linen.

Barberis explained at the time the carbon-14 result had been contaminated over the centuries by human contact with the Shroud. In addition, biological debris accumulated on the Shroud from the many locations in the Middle East, Turkey and Europe where historians and scientists from the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project have determined it traveled over the centuries.